May 05 2010
Maintaining a Healthy Heart and Fit Body Through Exercises
Exercising is not only done to improve one’s body shape, tone down muscles or reduce weight. In fact, one of the benefits that people can get from exercising is improving their cardiovascular efficiency, which also means that having proper exercise will definitely give you a healthy heart. However, not all types of exercises can be done to strengthen one’s heart, the exercises that one should do to improve his cardiovascular system are of course, cardiovascular exercises.
But you should be reminded that although exercising can help in improving the state of your heart, it is not enough. Having the right nutrition is also important in making your heart stronger. There are actually five components that you need to complete in order to ensure body fitness and heart improvement. The five components are muscle endurance and strength, aerobic capacity, body ratio and flexibility. Each of these components must be always present when exercising to note that you are doing the right thing. For instance, for an exercise like walking, only two of the five aspects are included. However, if you increase your intensity when walking by adding speed, duration and elevation then you are able to burn a greater amount of calories consequently making your heart stronger.
The right amount of exercise to be able to attain improvement of one’s heart is exercising with at least 65 to at most 85 percent of one’s maximum heart rate in the duration of at most 30 minutes per day, 5 days in a week. A 40-year old individual needs to have at least 108 to 153 BPM or beats per minute to be able to achieve benefits for fitness and his cardiovascular system. Once you become more fit, your level of exercise must again increase, since doing your regular exercise will take up less energy than when you were not yet that fit, consequently not burning as much calories and not helping in strengthening your heart.
For instance, when you started biking or jogging your average heart rate is 140 BPM. However, after a few months, your heart rate decreased to 120 BPM, this indicates that you should increase speed, incline or duration when exercising. If you do not do as recommended, then you will not burn that much calories making your exercise not really giving you any help.
As mentioned there are several exercises that will help in improving your heart and cardiovascular system. Some of these exercises are running or jogging, skiing, biking, swimming, jumping rope, roping or even climbing up and down the stairs. A usual routine that will definitely help you includes 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, 5 minutes of stretching, abdominal exercises for 10 minutes, 20 repetitions of push ups and sit ups, another 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercises and a cool down of 4 minutes.
Doing so for at most two weeks for 5 days a week will definitely help you to be fit and have good body shape. If you wish to lose weight rather than maintain body shape, then more rigorous exercises is advised. Of course, you should consult your physician for any exercise routine that you wish to do.
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